We're always pleased when Master Nick Hall sends one of his missives from somewhere along the Spanish coastline. Usually we hear about what's going behind the scenes. Now, writing for World Car Fans, Hall talks about his turn behind the wheel of the Caparo T1 — that low-volume "Formula car for the street" created by…

Germany is the land of the free when it comes to driving — one endless, luscious, bouncy ribbon of delimited highways. If one could find a 300-mph car, one could drive at 300mph; that's the glossy image projected around the world. But Germany's relationship to highway speed is changing. Already the road to glory is…

This past week took me to Top Marques in Monaco, the ostentatious home of pure money yet consistent proof money does not buy class. Monaco is populated by rich, orange women well into their 50s who still believe they can carry off miniskirts. But it is also home to the world's most glamorous car show, with passenger…

When he's not writing Car Hack's Notebook columns for the Jalop, our mate from Birmingham, UK, Nick Hall must suffer his day job. Such drudgery it is to fly to Scottsdale, Arizona to drive the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera in the desert at ludicrous speeds, trying to outwit a police force that lives to put his…

Last month, St phane Peterhansel, Cyril Despres and Hans Stacey cemented their status as legends with victory in arguably the scariest, most hardcore event in the world, and yet their wins on an event simply known as The Dakar barely registered a blip on the news. When a ChampCar driver next complains about a bump in…

My dad's love of classics always bemused me as a child. This was a time of radical leaps in horsepower, performance, styling, every facet of car design, and he was buried in some edition of Pipe Smokers and Classic Jaguar Lovers monthly, with a free anorak with every subscription. He clearly knew nothing...

At a show where pure lunacy struggles to get through the door, it was always going to be tough to pick out a star, but that's the job and ignoring the more obvious option here it is: The Mission 400 Plus. Now why this modified Porsche above the countless others that littered the show? Well how's about the basic…

Alongside occasional trips to the temples of the automotive world like Ferrari, Lamborghini and Pagani, it is one of my dirty pleasures to tour the German tuning scene whenever I get the chance. Some hacks look down at anything that doesn't come with a bought-and-paid-for test drive in Southern Spain. But for me, the…

Now we've all seen the tide turn, smashing the SUV against the rocks like a third-world fishing boat. If you drive one in Europe, you may as well have set off a dirty bomb in a schoolyard - such is the naked aggression towards the forest-burning, baby-seal-clubbing chariots of death.

[Big welcomes all around to Nick Hall, international man of letters and reviewer of the world's most potent and storied tractors. This is his first in what we hope to be innumerable Hacker's Notebook columns. And by innumerable, we mean he's being compensated in dollars Kelvin. Thanks, Nick — ed.]

We'd imagine driving a supercar in test-mule form might be a bit like eating dough out of the bowl or drinking cabernet straight from the barrel. Considering most journos are never allowed that kind of experience, it would seem Lee Noble surely trusts Jalopnik homeboy Nick Hall with his wife life. Lee let Hall take an…

Our globetrotting, supercar-flogging buddy from Blighty, Nick Hall, tells the story of Arash Farboud's bid to build a better Ferrari. After his attempt to acquire an Enzo was met with a prancing, equinine "SOL, champ," Farboud picked up a more accessable Porsche Carrera GT and used a portion of his family's pharma…

We Yanks get nothing so slithery as the TVR Tuscan on these shores. In fact, we get nothing at all from TVR, which became the laughing stock of yuppiedome during the mid-1980s by inflicting some of the most egregious hardware this side of the Baltic Sea on America's newly minted upper-middle rich. But in the UK, these…

We've really taken a shine to the car reviews of UK-based writer Nick Hall, which have been featured of late on German Car Fans. This week, the motoring scribe's attention is on the the BMW 130i, that spry new baby Bimmer powered by BMW's fine 3.0-liter six. Of course we won't see it in the US this year, but if VW's…